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City of Heroes' Mission Architect System Launches

Players of NCSoft's MMORPG can now make and share their own custom quests.

NCSoft is bursting at the seams with pride today, having officially launched its new Mission Architect system for the popular MMOPRG City of Heroes. The new system comes free to all players as part of the Issue 14: Architect update to the game.

The Mission Architect system essentially gives players the freedom to create and share their own quests and storylines in-game, something which NCSoft claims gives the game "an unprecedented and virtually limitless amount of user-generated content."

In addition to allowing players to create their own missions using thousands of existing assets from the game, players may also use the Mission Architect system to personalize their stories by building their own characters and enemy groups using City of Heroes' highly regarded Character Creator system. Players will be able to publish up to three story arcs per account which will be displayed to all players across all servers in the Mission Architect system. Each user-created story can have up to five missions containing up to twenty-five individual objectives. Players will even be able to write custom dialogue for their missions, offering true flexibility in dynamic story telling.

Anyone got any special quests for Ms. Liberty?

"We are very excited for City of Heroes to be the first-ever MMO to offer this revolutionary new system to our players," said Brian Clayton, general manager and executive producer of the franchise. "Within two weeks of opening the beta version of Mission Architect to our community, players published an astounding 5,000 custom stories, representing up to 25,000 user-created missions. Such a steady in-flux of fresh content offers the capacity for endless adventures to City of Heroes subscribers."

Nothing like making the players who pay the subscription fees also make their own content!

Bryn says: What a rip-off! You spend all this time investing time and love into leveling up your superhero toon, only to then have to go out and make your own content?! I am, of course, joking. This is a pretty neat idea that other MMOG developers could stand to pay attention to.

Not sure it'd work for my WoW obsession though. I'd just make all my own quests the same: find pub, sit in char, drink ale, vomit. Repeat ad nauseum.